The Awakening of Dr. Brown

Chapter 4

“It was never a secret,” Ethan said, squirming in his chair. “I don’t go around announcing it.” But he felt completely fraudulent.

Phoenix made a soft breath sound that wasn’t quite laughter. “You must think I’ve been living under a rock.” She said it lightly, but Ethan didn’t believe it for a minute.

She must feel like a fool, he thought. I’ve humiliated her. He had an idea that wasn’t something this-or any-woman would easily forgive.

“Not really,” he said, leaning toward her, eager to make amends for having deceived her. “It’s understandable. I’ve tried pretty hard to-” he smiled wryly “-keep a low profile.”’ He waited, but she didn’t smile back. He cleared his throat and ploughed on. “It helps that the tabloids are easily bored, and the mainstream media know better than to intrude-if they want to keep on good terms with the White House, that is. So it’s been a while since my picture’s been in the papers or the six o’clock news…” He was babbling.

He forced himself to meet those incredible eyes…an incredible risk, he knew. For a moment he felt as if he were balanced on the very edge of a high diving board, and vertigo one scant breath away. He had the impression of something lurking beneath the shimmering surface of her eyes but didn’t trust his balance enough to look closely to see what it was. Hoping it might be forgiveness, he gestured toward his beard and smiled.

“And then, I guess I have my own little ways of disguising myself. You said it-people see what they expect to see. And the president’s son would have to be about the last person you’d have expected to run into in a meeting with a committee of slum tenants.”

“True.” But she was brittle, still. Unmollified. Her eyes shimmered through the curtain of her lashes like sunlit water through a forest. “All the more reason you should have warned me, don’t you think?”

“I was trying to keep-”

“-a low profile. I know.” She leaned sharply forward, like a cat pouncing on a mouse. “Tell me, Doc-or I guess I can call you Ethan, now-what else were you trying to do?”

“I beg your pardon?” The suddenness of her anger was as shocking to him as a slap.

“What is it you’re after? Is it some kind of political thing?” She was braced on her forearms, shoulders hunched and eyes shooting cold blue fire. “If it’s the publicity-”

“Publicity would be the last thing any of us want,” Ethan countered in a voice as cold as her eyes, but much, much softer. Because it was his way, when faced with violence of any kind-actions or emotions-to retreat to his calm, quiet place, he said, oh, so calmly…oh, so quietly, “What I’m trying to do is exactly what I said I was trying to do, which is help some people get their apartments fixed up. And hopefully stay out of the news in the process.” He paused, which was a mistake; he could feel the walls of his quiet place creaking under the pressure of the emotions they were trying to hold at bay. “I didn’t ask you to pick me out of that group. Why did you do that, by the way?” And he could hear the tension in his voice, now. “What, exactly, were you trying to do?”

The question left behind a ringing silence, like the crash of cymbals in a stunning finale. As Phoenix listened to its dying echoes she was conscious of an overwhelming sense of frustration, even failure. It was the same way she felt when the perfect word, the perfect lyric, the perfect golden note eluded her…which made no sense at all.

What was it she’d expected…hoped for? With a few exceptions, she was used to either intimidating men or exciting them. She was used to seeing lust, awe, even fear in a man’s eyes. She didn’t know what to do with this man, this doctor who seemed neither intimidated nor excited, who gazed at her with his shaman’s eyes and spoke to her without any nervousness at all. Like Patrick, she thought. Except that, unlike Patrick, with this man she had no doubt in her mind that the emotions were there. She knew it…felt it, like a tremor beneath her breastbone…like a knot in her stomach.

With their eyes locked and all senses focused with laserlike intensity on each other, it was a moment or two before either Phoenix or Ethan noticed the waiter. When he announced himself with a discreet cough, they sprang back from each other, straightening, Ethan thought, like two tied-down saplings when the ropes binding them are sliced through with an axe. They sat in a twanging silence while their plates were set before them, murmured identical automatic thank yous and barely noticed when the waiter asked if there was anything else they required and, unanswered, went away.

“What’s the matter?” Ethan ventured, picking up his fork. Phoenix was simply staring at her plate.

“Spaghetti and marinara sauce. You ordered spaghetti and marinara sauce?”

“Yeah? So did you,” said Ethan, mystified. She was muttering under her breath, now, shaking her head.

And suddenly she was laughing, silently but he could hear real amusement in it. “I can’t believe you. You’re having lunch with Phoenix. You have a beard. And you order spaghetti with red sauce. Now, that’s confidence.”

Ethan was smiling too as he stabbed his fork into the pile of spaghetti on his plate, though he still wasn’t sure what the joke was. He did know it felt good to have her pleased with him again. Surprisingly good. Unbelievably good.

He watched, bemused, as Phoenix attacked her own plate with a gusto more in character with the rock star she was than the businesswoman she pretended to be. Phoenix. This is Phoenix. He wondered why he kept having to remind himself of that fact. And when the reality of it would set in.

“Were we quarreling just now?” She asked it casually, not looking up from her plate.

Ethan chewed and swallowed before he answered. “Nah-we don’t know each other well enough to quarrel.” But deep inside he felt a quiver of something… Awareness? Anticipation? Excitement?

She nodded. “That’s what I thought.”

They ate in silence for a few minutes. Phoenix wondered whether the doc was just concentrating hard on getting spaghetti from plate to mouth without embarrassing mishaps, or if maybe he was thinking about what might be happening between them. And whether she was thinking about it, too. Which she was. She was thinking this Doc Brown, the president’s son, was going to be more of a challenge than she’d expected. One she was actually looking forward to. She was enjoying herself more, in fact, felt more excited, more alive than she had since she’d come back to this miserable town.

She put down her fork and picked up her water glass. She sipped, and still holding the glass, motioned with her head toward a nearby table. “The guy in the dark blue suit. I just figured it out-the phone call, the stalling tactics in the garage-he belongs to you, doesn’t he?”

She felt a shiver of pleasure when the doc turned ever so slightly pink. Though the color may have been attributable to his sudden fit of coughing.

“Belongs to me? Not hardly.” He drank some water to bring himself under control again. “His name is Tom, by the way-Tom Applegate. He’s one of two guys I do my best not to inconvenience. The other one is Carl Friedenburg-I’ll introduce you to them when I get a chance. If they lose track of me they have to answer to my dad-or my stepmom, which is much worse-so I try to be a good boy.”

He spoke lightly, but it vexed him, she could see-the loss of privacy. She knew how he felt, of course. It occurred to her that, as different as their lives were in so many ways, she and this particular doctor might have some things in common. She could use that, she decided. She would play on it, their commonality.

“I met them once, you know,” she said, tackling the spaghetti again. “Your parents. The president and First Lady.”

“Really?” He paused with fork halfway to his mouth. “At the White House?”

“Uh-uh-it was in Dallas. About…five years ago. A benefit concert-world hunger, I think. Maybe you remember it?” He shook his head; Phoenix shrugged. “The Parish Family were among the organizers. That’s your mom, right?”

“Stepmom.”

“Right. Anyway, they came-President and Mrs. Brown. There was a big reception afterward, so we all got to meet them. Nice people, I thought-especially Dixie.” She lifted her lashes and smiled at him. “Your dad seems a bit starched…”

“He can be that way sometimes,” Ethan said, smiling back. “Dixie keeps it from being terminal.”

Phoenix laughed, a rusty little chortle. “Really? And how does she do that?”

“I haven’t a clue,” said Ethan with a one-shouldered shrug. “It’s just a way she has, I guess. She’s always been that way-she…brings out the music in people.”

“Interesting…” Phoenix murmured.

“What?”

She shook her head. But she was thinking now about Ethan’s father, President Everett Charlton Brown. And that, if Dixie Parish, of the world-famous folksinging Parish Family, had managed to find music beneath that Mount Rushmore facade…well. It was interesting, that’s all.

“I met your sister, too,” she said, twirling spaghetti on the tines of her fork. “And her husband-he’s Indian, right? A sheriff, or something like that.”

Ethan nodded, perhaps not a wise move, given the forkful of spaghetti he was about to deliver to his mouth. “Native American. Apache. Arizona. Oops…damn.”

Phoenix casually reached across the table and wiped the tiny smear of marinara sauce from a bare patch of his chin with her thumb. But inside, her heartbeat stumbled; she felt a surge of something she told herself was triumph.

“One of the advantages of being a rock star is that nobody expects you to be politically correct,” she purred, licking the sauce from her thumb. She could still feel him there, like the residual tingle of electric shock-the slightly sandpapery texture of his skin…the coarse-silk weave of his beard against the backs of her fingers.

“I thought he was fascinating,” she murmured, as Ethan calmly wiped his beard with his napkin. She smiled down at her plate. Oh, the emotions were there, all right…the fire, the passion. She’d felt it. Getting to it-getting past that shaman’s calm, that incredible self-control of his-this was going to be fun. “I wrote a song about him. Believe it or not. What a coincidence, huh?” She slanted a look at him through her lashes. “It’s true, though. Your brother-in-law was the inspiration for ‘Wild Man, Gentle Heart.’ He has such a fierce look-like Ghenghis Khan about to wreak havoc on the villagers. And yet…he has this gentle way about him…”

Maybe, she thought, that’s all it is, this fascination he holds for me. I just happen to be a sucker for a gentle man.

“My sister apparently thought so,” Ethan said. He was so quiet now. Unnaturally quiet.

“What about you?” Yes, and it reminded her of something, that quietness, something she couldn’t quite put her finger on.

“Bronco’s a good man.”

“No, I mean, where were you that night? I seem to have met your whole family. Except you. Imagine, Doc, if we’d met five years ago…”

He picked up his water glass and held it, almost like a shield between them, it seemed to her. “Five years ago I was a med student-overworked and stressed out in L.A. I doubt I’d have been much fun.” Over the top of the glass his eyes watched her…dark, quiet, wary.

Yes, that was what he reminded her of. A stag, hiding in the underbrush, watching the hunter. He was on his guard now, fortified against her. Time to back off a little, she thought, enjoying the game. Give him some breathing room.

She laughed, her husky trademark chuckle. “No offense, Doc, but you’re not exactly a barrel of laughs now.”

And as she’d thought he would, he smiled. It was a wry and self-deprecating smile, and it banished the wariness from his eyes. As she’d thought it would. But what came in its stead was something she didn’t want to see. Something bleak and sad…like dark pools reflecting back the face of tragedy.

“Sorry,” he said softly, “I didn’t think this was a particularly funny situation.”

She caught her breath and looked away, and Ethan didn’t know whether the lurch he felt in his chest was triumph, or regret. In the strange verbal fencing match they were engaged in, he knew he’d just scored a touché. He felt no sense of victory, and yet…he wasn’t sorry for it, either.

“We have-” The sports watch on his wrist emitted a tiny electronic beep. “I have to get back to the clinic,” he said with an exhalation, without glancing at his wrist. He was conscious of conflicting feelings, now-both relief and regret. “Can we-”

Phoenix nodded and signaled to the waiter with a platinum American Express credit card. Out of the corner of his eye Ethan saw Tom Applegate fold his napkin and push back his chair.

“What I was going to say,” said Ethan, “was, can we get together again to talk about this?” He hadn’t wanted the job, dammit. But since he’d been designated spokesman for the residents of The Gardens, he supposed the responsibility for protecting their interests was his, like it or not. He told himself that was his only reason for wanting to see this woman again. He told himself that beyond that they had nothing in common, that she would complicate his life in unimaginable ways. A woman like this could easily make a man lose his sense of direction, make him forget his principles, his purpose.

I need to get away from her, he thought. I need to get my bearings.

“Listen,” he said, “you don’t have to leave if you’re not-”

“I’m done here.” She kept her face averted as she scrawled a signature across the check the waiter had brought in its leather folder, as brisk and efficient as any executive or attorney concluding a power lunch. Try as he would without seeming too obvious about it, Ethan couldn’t make out the signature or the name on the card. She snapped the folder shut and shoved the credit card carelessly into the pocket of her dove-gray suit and rose. “Shall we go?”

“Sure.” Her face was somber, Ethan noted. So still and set…the way it had been just before she’d walked out of the conference room. He wondered if it was just her way, to run when confronted with something she didn’t want to deal with.

He followed her out of the restaurant, pausing at the entrance, as he’d learned to do, to let Tom Applegate go ahead of him. He waited for Tom’s nod, then pushed through the door and found Phoenix waiting for him on the sidewalk, watching the interaction between him and his bodyguard and smiling a little half smile.

“Tom,” Ethan said, “I’d like you to meet Phoenix.”

The Secret Service agent nodded, deadpan, and said, “Nice meeting you, ma’am,” like the well brought-up Southerner he was. He allowed himself to glance only briefly at the world-famous rock star before his eyes moved on, looking all around, up and down the street, watching the sidewalk…watching everything. Everyone.

In a voice rich with amusement, Phoenix said, “Nice meeting you, too, Tom.” Then she linked her arm through Ethan’s and murmured out the side of her mouth as they moved together down the sidewalk, “Can’t be easy keeping a low profile when you’ve got six and a half feet of bodyguard following you everywhere.”

He gave a huff of laughter but didn’t reply. He didn’t-because her scent was inside his head and her heat was inside him, and all his nerves and senses were converging on the source of that heat like moths to a candle flame. He tried to remind himself that this was Phoenix. Phoenix-world-class performer and master of disguise. Nothing about this woman is real. Trouble was, his body didn’t believe it. Not for a minute. His body knew only that she was a woman, vibrant and alive and unbelievably beautiful.

“Do you need a ride back to your clinic?” she asked as they approached the dark maw of the parking garage. “I can have Patrick send a car-”

“That’s okay, Tom’s got it covered.” Smiling a half smile of his own, Ethan nodded toward the Secret Service agent, who was muttering into his wrist. Moments later an anonymous dark sedan with tinted windows rolled silently up the garage’s exit ramp and stopped beside them.

“Wow, just like Dick Tracy,” Phoenix murmured. “I’m impressed.”

“Your tax dollars at work,” said Ethan dryly. Tom had opened the back door of the sedan and was waiting for him. The car’s engine idled, pumping out visible waves of heat. “About that meeting…”

“Sure. How about tomorrow? Come by the studio. After you get off work…before-doesn’t really matter, I’ll be there, working. You can meet the band.”

“The band…uh, sure.” He felt steeped in heat, his brain fuzzy. He frowned. “Working, you said?”

“That’s what I said.” Her smile was tilted, her voice rusty and sardonic. “What did you think? All us rock stars spend our days just layin’ around smokin’ pot and doin’ drugs and partyin’, right? Like I told you, I’m pretty much just a working girl. I have schedules to keep, deadlines to meet, people depending on me.”

Ethan looked at her for a long moment, seeing the perfect oval of her face sleekly framed in raven-black, and for some reason remembering the way she’d looked when he’d first seen her that morning, with all that hair rippling down her back and slapping against the back pockets of her jeans. He had a suddenly and visceral sense of what it would feel like…cool and silky against his skin. He heard himself say, “I guess there’s a lot I don’t know about you.”

“That there is, Doc.” In the murky light of the garage her eyes seemed shadowed, even sad. “A whole helluva lot.”

You idiot, this is Phoenix!

Yes, but her eyes were a woman’s eyes, and her mouth a woman’s mouth, and his mind kept asking him why he didn’t just lean over and kiss it. His mind already knew how it would taste…how it would grow moist and soft under his…and nothing else mattered much, did it?

But it did. Half-suffocated by her heat, with the sedan’s well-tuned engine pulsing inside his head, he said in a voice he couldn’t hear, “There’s a lot I’d like to know about you.” And then, “Starting with your name.”

How long did she stare at him in that thumping, suffocating silence, and him feeling trapped, imprisoned, helpless as a fly in molasses? He didn’t know, but when she finally spoke her words thrilled him beyond his imagining, lifted his heart higher than any words she’d ever uttered, stirred his soul more deeply than any song she’d ever sung.

“It’s Joanna,” she said. “Joanna Dunn.”

And he stood and watched her walk away down the exit ramp, her high heels click-click-clicking on the concrete.

He was barely aware of Tom’s hand on his elbow, a polite reminder. He scarcely remembered getting into the car, hearing the door slam behind him, shutting out the heat. He did know that he spoke to Carl Friedenburg as Tom got into the front seat beside him, but he had no idea what it was he’d said. And his only thought, as the sedan rolled out of the garage and joined the flow of traffic in the stifling street, like the words of a great new song playing over and over inside his head: her name is Joanna. Joanna Dunn.

As he’d expected, Ruthie, Father Frank and Mrs. Schmidt were waiting for him when he got back to the clinic, lounging around the reception counter in a way that reminded Ethan of the cats in his aunt Lucy’s barn back in Iowa, the way they’d lie with bodies at ease, eyes alert, springing to life instantly at his entrance to come running, tails aloft, meowing and twining around his legs, begging.

“How did it go?”

“What did you find out?”

“What was she like?”

He laughed out loud at his vision of the barn cats, surprising them, but he didn’t try to explain. “It went fine,” he said. What did I find out? I found out her name is Joanna…Joanna Dunn. But for some reason he kept that to himself, like a hard-rock prospector hugging to his heart the single gold nugget he’d found.

“What’s she like, Phoenix?” Ruthie asked again, her dark eyes shy.

Ethan drew in a breath and exhaled it in a rush. “Not like anybody you or I’ve ever met before,” he said on bumps of dry laughter. Everyone nodded, then shook their heads; it was the answer they seemed to have expected. He paused, then added almost guiltily, “We went out for lunch.”

Ruthie gave an excited gasp. “You had lunch with Phoenix?”

“Wow,” said Mrs. Schmidt, “were you mobbed?”

Ethan coughed and ran a hand through his hair-a gesture he realized he’d inherited from his father, and made a mental note to stop. “I was recognized-she wasn’t. Believe it or not. She has a way of…just sort of blending in. Practically becomes invisible when she wants to be.”

“Wow,” said Mrs. Schmidt again, shaking her head. Ruthie sighed and leaned her chin on her hand.

“Did you talk about The Gardens?” Father Frank asked in a low voice, glancing over his shoulder. The doctor filling in for Ethan, Sid Grenville, was heading their way, scribbling busily on a chart, while behind him an elderly black man wearing a hat and suit jacket with his overalls ushered his frail-looking wife toward the door.

“Didn’t have much chance,” Ethan said in the same tone. “It was mostly just…getting acquainted.”

But, when he thought back over his time with Phoenix it began to seem to him more like some strange sort of verbal fencing match than real conversation. In his memory he saw them circling each other…feinting and parrying, advancing and retreating. He remembered his one small touché. Undoubtedly she’d scored a few off him, too, but all in all he figured the score had ended up about even. She had, after all, given him her name. He couldn’t underestimate the importance of that.

“Hey, you made it,” Sid Grenville said as he joined them. Dr. Grenville was a tall, balding man with wire-rimmed glasses and kind eyes. Not much older than Ethan, he had a wife and two kids and was struggling to pay back his student loans. He couldn’t afford to spend much time at the clinic, since he’d only recently ventured out on his own and was trying to get a family practice established in offices near the downtown medical center. And since that was clear over on the other side of the harbor, Ethan knew it was a considerable inconvenience for Sid to fill in for him in the middle of a day like this.

“Sorry I’m late,” he said contritely.

The other doctor shrugged and smiled as he passed the chart off to Mrs. Schmidt and stabbed his pen in the general direction of his lab coat pocket. “No problem. How was lunch?”

“Great,” said Ethan. “What’d I miss?”

Dr. Grenville filled him in on the morning’s cases and possible follow-ups, then took his leave. The door had barely swooshed shut behind him before Father Frank got right back to business. “So. Where do we go from here?”

“We have another meeting.” Ethan just did remember not to run his hand through his hair. “Tomorrow. At her studio-which reminds me, Bibi, I guess you’d better call that business manager of hers and find out where that is.” His mouth quirked sideways with his smile. “She says I can meet her band.”

“Oh, wow,” breathed Ruthie.

Her brother glanced at her and said soberly, “Well, I guess it’s better than nothing. Sure do wish we could get her to come down here, though. She doesn’t have any idea what kind of conditions those people are living in. I don’t think we’d have any trouble getting her to do what we want, if she could just…see it. She needs to see it with her own eyes.”

“Yeah,” said Ethan, “so do I.” His old friend gave him a startled look. “Well, what did you think?” Ethan shot back angrily. “You think I have any clue how those people live? She asked me, you know-what they wanted from her. I didn’t even know what to tell her. Hey-I didn’t exactly go into that meeting prepared to act as spokesman for a whole neighborhood, you know. I was completely unprepared and unqualified-” A small shushing noise from Mrs. Schmidt warned him just a heartbeat before he heard it-the careful and polite clearing of a throat.

Then a voice-rich and liquid, with traces of the South-a vaguely familiar voice. “Excuse me-are you the doctor?”

A few feet away a woman was standing-a young woman, buxom rather than plump, dressed in a faded T-shirt and too-tight shorts and balancing a chubby baby on one hip. Her dull black hair wasn’t any particular style, just pulled back in clumps and fastened with various rubber bands and clips, in the manner of frazzled mothers with no time to spare for primping. Her skin was the color of coffee with cream, and her dark eyes-her best feature-were almond-shaped and set at an exotic tilt.

When he saw those eyes Ethan felt a jolt like a punch to the gut, even before he recognized the child standing beside her in baggy pants, an oversized shirt and a baseball cap turned backward. A small child with arms folded defiantly across his chest, an angry tilt to his chin and a wounded look in his proud amber eyes.